


Objection (I Wish to be the Object of Your Affection)

by misura



Category: Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types
Genre: Background Fujioka Haruhi/Hitachiin Hikaru/Hitachiin Kaoru, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 18:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11811423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: In which Tamaki takes Drastic Measures to ensure Kyoya's future happiness.





	Objection (I Wish to be the Object of Your Affection)

When selecting an apartment, Kyoya had ensured to select something spacious. Not, as others might, because he could expect to fill up the extra space with various small and useless items of dubious (or rather: non-existent) value, but rather because he disliked feeling crowded.

What little furniture there was had been selected both for its high quality and its functionality. One specific spot of wall had been reserved for the display of either a painting or a poster, depending on which visitor might be expected to view it (and, in doing so, form a more favorable impression of the apartment's inhabitant).

Thus waking to find himself in an apartment decidedly qualifying for such adjectives as 'stuffed', 'chaotic' and 'decorated by a madman' came as something of a surprise.

 

It was all Tamaki's fault, of course.

Kyoya briefly considered murdering him - the body might easily enough be lost amongst the general mess of things, but decided against it on the basis of not feeling up to quite so much exertion this early in the day.

He made himself some coffee while Tamaki babbled on about why he had felt compelled to commit this gross and wholly unwarranted invasion of Kyoya's privacy.

"Ooh! Is that a new model of coffee machine?"

Kyoya felt a headache coming up, which was a bit worrying. At a conservative estimate, Tamaki had only been talking at him for five minutes. He reflected that perhaps he had become more sensitive during the months during which he had led a perfectly peaceful, mostly Tamaki-free existence.

Certain allergies manifested in that manner.

"I don't know," he said, lifting the cup to his lips while ignoring the part of him that had been raised to always be polite to guests. Coffee rarely improved Tamaki's ability to please.

"Can I try some?"

Kyoya imagined the worst that might happen if he were to tell Tamaki that if, after inviting himself into Kyoya's apartment, Tamaki wanted coffee, he could perfectly well make it himself.

_Oh well. That's what I'm paying insurance for, after all._

 

As it transpired, after a week of becoming resigned to his continued presence, Tamaki had come on a mission of adventure, drama and romance.

"I heard that you were going to marry a sixty-year old woman for her fortune," Tamaki said, which sounded preposterous. "Or possibly a thirty-year old woman whose family owns a chain of hotels?"

"What if I am?" Against his better judgment, Kyoya had invited Tamaki to lunch.

It had seemed easier than inviting someone in whose company he might actually have accomplished something and waiting for Tamaki to 'just happen' to pass by and proceed to thoroughly derail what had been promising to be a fruitful conversation.

Tamaki rose and struck a pose. "I am here to tell you to listen to your heart. Young man, do not despair of finding true love! Do not give up hope simply because the road is long and winding!"

"Would there be any point in asking you to sit down and stop embarrassing yourself?"

Tamaki gave him a thumbs up. "Just consider me your personal cupid."

Personal annoyance would be more like it. "I'd rather not. Shall we go?"

"You should be more open to romance," Tamaki declared. He did sit down, though, so Kyoya was willing to consider this a small victory.

"You don't think my impending nuptials are romantic?"

"What impending nuptials?" Tamaki asked. "Say, this cake is really good! I should write down the address of this place and mention it to Hunny in my daily newsletter."

"You write a daily newsletter?" Of course Tamaki wrote a daily newsletter.

"Fiftty-six people are already subscribed. I was going to mention it to you when there were forty-nine, so you could be the fiftieth, but then three people subscribed while I was asleep." Tamaki wrung his hands. "So now I guess that you will have to be the hundredth. I'm very sorry."

"What makes you think that I have any intention of subscribing at all?" Kyoya made a mental note to have one of his on-line aliases subscribe - just to get some idea of what Tamaki wrote about, other than culinary reviews.

"There's going to be a prize. I won't tell you what it is, but I can promise you that it's something really great."

 

The next day, Tamaki claimed to have 'urgent business' elsewhere, which would have given Kyoya a perfect opportunity to get some actual work done, except for the fact that he'd already agreed to have lunch with someone whose family held no influence whatsoever and whose connections were of no use to him at all, being as non-existent as their family fortune.

Still, after Tamaki, it was nice to spend some time with someone sensible.

"Oh, yes, of course I knew about the newsletter," said Haruhi. She looked very professional - her clothes perhaps a trifle more expensive that she ought to be able to afford, given her salary, but then, Kyoya rather doubted that the twins would have shown her the price tags.

Annoying, yes; idiots, no. In that way, Kyoya supposed they were a step up from Tamaki.

"I believe he planned to use it to share the common folk's wisdom he'd pick up by living with me." Haruhi looked away. "Since that didn't work out, now he's using it for something else."

"How very practical of him."

Haruhi shrugged. "I suppose you don't really need to read it, given that you're living with him."

Kyoya considered pointing out that it was the other way around. He, at least, had been raised better than to barge into someone's life and expected them to make room for you.

"But for the rest of us, it's a nice way of staying in touch, you know. Of feeling like we're still a part of your life."

Kyoya forced himself to smile. "Would you like to take some cake back with you to the office?"

 

"Well, of course I wanted to reassure everyone about your wedding," said Tamaki.

He seemed a trifle nervous, which Kyoya supposed should be gratifying apart from the fact that he didn't feel particularly gratified.

"And it occurred to you that the quickest, most efficient way to do so was to send everyone an e-mail. Which is quite true, naturally. Only imagine, if you'd used your phone, it probably would have taken hours to spread the news. Assuming you wouldn't have gotten distracted halfway."

Tamaki frowned. Possibly, he was under the mistaken impression that he might change the subject of the conversation by pretending that he had forgotten what it had been about.

"Now that you mention it, I probably could have used my phone. I didn't, because yours always seems to be switched off or broken when I call, but since you already knew that you weren't getting married, I suppose I wasn't going to call you anyway."

"Perhaps if you were to limit yourself to calling me at times when people might reasonably be expected to be awake, they would actually leave their phones turned on more often."

"I can't help it if I want to talk someone in the middle of the night!" Tamaki looked distressed. "And I would be more than happy to comfort you if you'd just had a bad dream. I wouldn't care at all if you woke me up in the middle of the night. That's what friends do for one another."

"If I recall correctly, the one time I did answer my phone, you wanted to talk about a TV-show you were watching, and how it was your life's new ambition to be more like its main character."

"I was hoping you'd agree with me," said Tamaki. "Then we could have both worn funny hats and gone out into the world, traveling incognito and doing good wherever we would go. And we could have sent everyone postcards with clues on them about where we would be heading next."

A logical, reasonable person traveling by himself would get in all sorts of trouble if he were to behave like a character from one of Tamaki's beloved TV-shows. Tamaki, being Tamaki, would be perfectly fine, though, if only due to the hard work of the Suoh family guards. (Well, all right, Kyoya would probably ask a few of the Ohtori guards to join them. He imagined the Hitachiin, Haninozuka and Morinozuka families would make contributions as well.)

"Sorry to disappoint by living in the real world. Don't let me stop you, though."

Tamaki sighed. "It's too late now. I've already made different plans."

"Dare I hope these plans involve finding a place of your own to live?"

Tamaki beamed at him. "That's phase one."

"Good."

"I completed that one weeks ago. I'm in phase two now. You hadn't noticed?"

 

"So milord is making an idiot of himself again." Hikaru shrugged. "What else is new?"

Kyoya offered him a friendly smile. "If he has told you anything at all about this plan of his, it would be a good idea to tell me now. Who knows, I might even forget this entire thing is your fault to begin with."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Kaoru said.

Kyoya made his smile a little friendlier. "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you needed a distraction to prevent an awkward situation from occurring. Perhaps something to do with Haruhi. Tamaki was very much taken with her at one point, after all."

"What if we said we were just bored?"

"Regrettably, I would be forced to order you killed. Discretely, it goes without saying."

Hikaru sighed. "Fine. So we made up some stuff about you planning to get married to some girl from some influential family. It's not as if that's not what you plan on doing anyway."

"Or so you told Haruhi," Kaoru said.

"Who probably thought that you were being very sensible and logical and gave you her hearty approval for going about the whole thing so cold-bloodedly."

"I rather think that's between me and Haruhi. Just what is it that Tamaki plans on doing?"

There was something unpleasantly familiar about the way the twins looked at one another. It was the sort of look that suggested the observer (which was to say, in this case, Kyoya) had missed something blindingly obvious and should, perhaps, but probably not, be pitied enough to be given a clue.

"We're sure we don't know," said Kaoru.

"Besides," Hikaru added, "we rather think that's between you and Tamaki."

Petty and unhelpful as usual - no surprise there, really. He wondered how Haruhi dealt with it.

 

Tamaki had made dinner. He had acquainted himself with Kyoya's kitchen with a speed that would have been remarkable only to someone who did not know that underneath the foolish, annoying and idiotic Tamaki dwelled an equally foolish, annoying and idiotic Tamaki who was also very smart.

Kyoya had never been able to quite explain to himself how that worked. He only knew that it did, and thus, that one underestimated Tamaki's abilities at one's own peril.

Not that he foresaw any risky situations involving Tamaki's ability to properly use kitchen equipment.

"You know, I'm not going to marry someone I barely know simply because of their family."

Tamaki smiled at him. "I know. You're too much of a romantic. Like me."

"I don't think we're that much alike, really."

"We're both good-looking, rich, intelligent young men."

"In fact, one might almost call us opposites." On the surface, from a distance, perhaps there were some similarities, but no more than there were between, say, Tamaki and the twins.

"Ah." Tamaki stabbed a finger in his direction. "Exactly. Opposites! Our relationship in a nutshell."

"My point was that perhaps you might consider moving out, given that there is no chance of the thing you claimed to want to protect me from actually occurring."

Tamaki blinked. "But that was just an excuse! A ruse!"

"A lie, in other words?"

"You just said that we were opposites."

"I fail to see how that is relevant."

"Opposites," Tamaki repeated. "And you know, I feel the very same thing."

"You feel that we are opposites." Kyoya allowed his expression to imply a certain amount of doubt, bordering on incredulity. "You, who mere seconds talked about our many similarities."

"So you admit that they exist."

Kyoya realized somewhat to his surprise that his head did not hurt. He was annoyed with Tamaki, true, but he felt almost good about being annoyed with Tamaki. Happy, one might say.

Being annoyed with Tamaki was not such a terrible thing to be, really. It was far superior to being worried about Tamaki, or wondering where Tamaki was, or missing Tamaki, in that odd way that meant Kyoya wasn't missing Tamaki at all - he was merely noting Tamaki's absence.

Well. This was inconvenient.

"Tamaki."

Tamaki's eyes were very bright. "Kyoya?"

"I expect you to be gone next week."

Tamaki blinked.

Kyoya went back to his dinner.

Tamaki's shoulders slumped.

"I'm sure the owner of the apartment next door can be induced to move. It will be far more convenient if you get your own place to keep your things, instead of cluttering up mine. The rent is fairly steep, but nothing unusual for this neighborhood. I'm certain you can afford it."

 

"Congratulations," said Haruhi. She sounded a little uncertain. Her clothes seemed less expensive than last time they'd met for lunch. At a guess, they were by some relatively unknown designer who might shortly become far better known (and thus exponentially more expensive).

"How - ah." Kyoya allowed himself a wry smile. "Tamaki's newsletter. Thank you."

"It's just - " She hesitated. "Wasn't it a rather risky plan? It seems to me that you made a lot of assumptions. What if I had never mentioned our discussion to Kaoru? What if Hikaru hadn't run into Tamaki at that particular time and place? What if Tamaki had reacted differently?"

"These things have a way of working out."

"Unless, of course, there was no plan at all, in which case you just got lucky."

Kyoya liked Haruhi. Had she chosen to pursue a different career, he might have felt compelled to get her to accept a job working for the Ohtori family in some capacity or another.

As it was: "That hardly seems likely now, does it?"

"You're a little scary sometimes."

"Don't worry." Kyoya flashed her a grin. "Tamaki has made me promise to only ever use my intellect for good. He has made some interesting plans for our honeymoon - not that we're actually getting married, of course, but I suppose it's the thought that counts."

Haruhi considered. "I think the fact that you just implied you tricked him into dating you means you don't get any sympathy from me for anything that happens as a result."

"Fair enough."

"And anyway, you knew what you were getting into."


End file.
